Organisational Citizenship Behaviour of MBA students: The role of mindfulness and resilience
Introduction
While MBA programmes have been around for more than a century, the last quarter of a century has been an extraordinary period for MBA education. On the one hand the rise of business accompanied by globalisation accorded prestige to the MBA degree, on the other hand corporate scandals in the US caused a general deligitimisation of management as a profession. The criticism of MBA programmes became widespread at the beginning of 21st century and was joined by respected vocal educators and researchers of the time like Ian Mitroff (2004) and Sumantra Ghoshal (2005). They argued that there is nothing surprising about the scandals considering that business schools are promoting a management theory that focuses on the economic aspects of business to the exclusion of all others. The companies that were subject of laudatory case studies taught in business schools – Tyco, Enron and scores of others - turned to dust and some of the alumni lionised by their business schools turned out to be crooks. The financial meltdown of 2007-09 strengthened the belief that business schools share the blame for the crisis by implicitly inculcating a culture of amorality among their students.
Businesses have come to realise that shareholders still expect managers to maximise shareholder value but only through ethical means. In turn business schools which play a key role in shaping the mindset of budding business leaders are realising the need to focus not only on the in-role performance of MBA students but also on what supports the social and psychological environment in which the task performance takes place. This change in focus is leading to the examination of what can promote Organisation Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) among the future business leaders. OCB has become one of the most widely studied fields in industrial organisational psychology and human resource management literature (Ocampo et al., 2018) and is making significant inroads in management education.
Business scholars are gaining insights from neuroscience to understand why ‘brilliant’ leaders often make bad decisions. As a result of this convergence and cross-fertilisation of ideas, there is increasing attention to a strand of research developed under the heading of ‘mindfulness' with inputs from Psychology, Organisation Science, Education Science and related streams of knowledge. This research tries to examine and clarify the significance, structures, as well as causes of such decisions. According to recent literature search by Nishtha Arora (2020) there is a dearth of literature examining the impact of mindfulness on OCB. Like mindfulness, resilience has also become a buzz word in business. Specifically, there has been little research on how mindfulness can improve OCB of management students and whether resilience has a mediating role. This research aims to fill this gap. We also examine the role of mindfulness and resilience on the academic performance of MBA students.
Section snippets
OCB in business education
MBA programmes originated in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century when the country industrialised and companies sought scientific management. Till the 1960's, business schools were entrusted with the charge of educating the ignorant and producing good managers. This was sought to be achieved by emulating other good managers with input from Frederick Winslow Taylor's theories of scientific management. The faculty comprised “good ole boys dispensing war stories,
OCB and mindfulness
Currently there is a flourishing exploration of mindfulness and its potential uses in medicine, psychology, neuroscience and many other fields. This is quite remarkable because it represents the confluence of two domains of human knowledge that have never before encountered each other: medicine and science on the one hand and ancient contemplative practices on the other.
In early Eastern contemplative traditions, a unified mental experience is made up of numerous factors of which one important
Mindfulness and managerial performance
The practice of mindfulness has come out as an antidote to mindless cognition and behaviour and has demonstrated powerful positive effects for managers in diverse fields. The mechanisms through which mindfulness improves managerial performance is a subject of continuing research. Mindfulness improves project evaluation by reducing sunk cost bias (Hafenbrack et al., 2013), reduces possibility of serious accidents (Rerup, 2009), improves outcomes in negotiations (Pérez-Yus et al., 2020) and
Mediating role of resilience
For centuries people have been fascinated by accounts of youth who face great danger or grow up under adverse circumstances and nonetheless turn out well. In fiction these people are often assisted by a kind hearted person or some magical figure; in real life resilience arises from ordinary resources and processes. Resilience science in psychology and related fields emerged from clinical research on the risk for psychopathology but has matured over the last two decades with advances in theory,
Procedure and sample
Since our goal is to test the hypotheses outlined above deductively, we decided to take a quantitative, rather than qualitative, approach. All full time MBA students from three business schools in Croatia were invited to participate. It was explained that all the measurements will be through questionnaire and not by clinical instruments. Anonymised data from business schools was available for the whole cohort. Of those who volunteered a computer programme selected 200 students in a way that the
Results
The means standard deviations, correlations and reliability statistics are shown in Table 3. Correlations are significant and, as hypothesised, positive. Specifically, Mindfulness is positively related to Resilience, OCB and grades; and Resilience is positively related to OCB as also to grades.
We move on to examine whether increase in resilience by mindfulness is a side benefit or does it have a mediating role. Arguably, the best method for separating direct and indirect methods is the use of
Discussion
In the footsteps of Scott Bishop and colleagues (2006) we approached mindfulness from a secular perspective. We have used a unidimensional scale for measuring mindfulness. We find that Mindfulness is positively related to Resilience, OCB and academic performance. We have avoided same source concerns by using peer rating for measuring OCB.
We consider resilience as a mediating variable, not a moderating one. The distinction between moderation and mediation as explained by Shapiro et al. (2006) is
Conclusion
The business school is an effective institution which makes the biggest contribution (financial surplus) to the university. Unlike some of the nondescript buildings in other parts of a typical university, the graduate business school usually has a shiny new building with everything inside embossed with a logo. Yet all is not well in the MBA programme. The Universities relentlessly demand higher surplus from the business schools as the state aid to universities has been on a declining trend in
Acknowledgements
Helpful comments from S. J. Chión Chacón, B. E. Avolio Alecchi, the PUCP Research Group for Business Education and two anonymous referees are thankfully acknowledged.
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